Soil Amendment with Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi and Biochar Improves Salinity Tolerance, Growth, and Lipid Metabolism of Common Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)

Abstract

Salt stress in soils impacts grain crop yield. Soil amendment with biochar and arbuscular mycorrhizal alone has been analyzed to improve the growth of several crops under salinity stress. However, the combined application of biochar and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for the remediation of salinity and improvement of crop productivity in wheat are rarely discussed and have remained unclear. Therefore, this experiment was performed to investigate the effect with biochar (150 g biochar per each treated pot containing 3 kg soil) and/or arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (20 g AMF inoculum containing 80% mycorrhizal roots, 100–160 spores, and extraradical hyphae per each treated pot) on the productivity of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) under four salt stress gradients; 0, 50, 100, and 150 mM NaCl. The results show salinity significantly reduced plant height (9.9% to 22.9%), shoot fresh weight (35.6% to 64.4%), enzymatic activities (34.1% to 39.3%), and photosynthetic pigments—i.e., total chlorophyll contents (75.0%) and carotenoids contents (56.2%) of plants—as compared with control. Under exclusive biochar application, the plants were moderately tolerant to salinity stress, which was evident in their growth, moderately reduced fatty acid content, partially impaired enzymatic activity, and photosynthetic pigments, while under the exclusive AMF application, the wheat plants were relatively sensitive to salinity stress, resulting in impaired growth rate, decreased unsaturated fatty acid composition, enzymatic activity, and photosynthetic pigments. Conversely, under the co-application of biochar and AMF, wheat plants partially increased plant height (14.1%), shoot fresh biomass (75.7%), root fresh biomass (24.9%), partially increased enzymatic activity (49.5%), and unimpaired photosynthetic pigments (30.2% to 54.8%) of wheat under salinity stress. Current findings concluded that exclusive incorporation of biochar, and the synergistic application of AMF and biochar, could be utilized as a promising way to reduce the deleterious effects of salinity stress in wheat production.